The lexicalisation of syncope

Syncope is a prosodically motivated process removing medial vowels in longstemmed disyllabic Old English adjectives e.g. hālig ‘holy’ when inflected: nom/acc.pl.neut. hālgu *hāligu. Syncope should not affect short-stemmed forms such as hefig ‘heavy’ e.g. nom/acc.pl.neut. hefig *hefgu (Campbell 1959). However, forms such as hālig include derivational -ig, and produce surprising results. in relation to syncope, showing both over- and underapplication not attested in morphologically simple words. Two historical -ig suffixes exist: ig¹ (vulnerable to syncope) and -ig² (immune to syncope). I will show how this interaction of syncope with ig¹ results in a case of lexicalisation. I argue that cases of overapplication of syncope in forms containing -ig¹ e.g. short-stemmed hefgu indicate the lexicalisation of syncope in forms exhibiting -ig¹. Syncope becomes associated with -ig¹ to the extent that the affix itself becomes reanalysed as /j/ from /ij/ underlyingly. The original phonological conditions for syncope therefore cease to apply (Anderson 1989).